Ocasio-Cortez Attacks Public Funding for Tesla’s Green Technology

h/t Dr. Willie Soon – according to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, taxpayers have a right to expect a return for their green investments.

… “When we as a public choose to invest in new technologies, we deserve a return on that investment,” Ocasio-Cortez said while talking about the broader Progressive agenda to fund renewable and green technology research with taxpayer money.

“For far too long, we gave money to Tesla, we gave money to a ton of people and we got no return on our investment that the public made in creating technologies, and it’s about time we get our due because it’s the public that funded and financed a lot of innovative technologies,” Ocasio Cortez continued. …

Sadly Ocasio-Cortez also said a lot of other things which were not so sensible, like promoting her favourite broken window fallacy – her claim about the alleged benefits of the economic activity which would occur if the USA transitioned to green socialism.

Do you think Ocasio-Cortez will come to understand that most green initiatives cannot move on their own? If they require subsidies, they are not carbon-efficient. Subsidies come from taxes collected by individuals/companies that use fossil fuels while generating income. So the subsidies in themselves are back-loaded with CO2 emissions.

she’s a zealot that think she knows it all. Even if she could somehow muster up the needed intelligence for understanding, as long as it doesn’t fit her lefty world-view she will not be capable of understanding it.

“Investment” should never be done by the “public” except for basic necessities like transportation infrastructure and the country’s defense. Anything else, if it was worth “investing” in, would have plenty of private money pouring in from “investors” without the taxpayer being fleeced.

The only reason government has to do the “investing” in weather-dependent and weather-vulnerable “renewable” energy is because it isn’t worth a dime. The whole reason anyone sunk a nickel into such “green energy” garbage is “mandate and subsidy farming,” a favorite way for the “haves” to strip more wealth from the hands of the “have nots.” “Green energy” is nothing but a government-sponsored “pump and dump” scam.

She is exactly right in her promotion of socialist views. “…we deserve a return on that investment…” means – the company that got the investment doesn’t. In other words, it’s not fair Tesla and others are making money on government money. Somehow I doubt she is calling for an end to government money, just the profits that businesses get.

It doesn’t matter if there is in reality any harm or not. What matters is that those claiming that it is a harmful (due to it’s AGW aspects) are some of the most frequent fliers. That’s very much a do as I say not as I do situation. You don’t get to partake freely of that which you demonize and not get called a hypocrite for it.

No, the whole concept is most certainly NOT nonsense. The notion that CO2 emissions are going to cause some “climate change” Armageddon is indeed nonsense, but when you’re one of the preachers of the faith of Human-Induced Climate Catastrophe, then you damn sure shouldn’t be doing EXACTLY WHAT YOU’RE TELLING EVERYONE ELSE THEY NEED TO STOP DOING.

THAT is, indeed, “do as I say, not as I do.” And virtually every high profile idiot spewing alarmist “climate change” nonsense is a HYPOCRITE in that respect.

Bernie Sanders acts like CO2 is causing a deadly crisis on the Earth. He’s not alone. After this latest IPCC report came out, some people are getting downright hysterical in their rhetoric.

Since Bernie is so concerned, someone should ask Bernie what he plans to do about the fact that China and India are allowed by the Paris Climate Agreement to produce as much CO2 as they desire until at least the year 2030. About the time the crisis is supposed to take place, accourding to the IPCC’s latest report.

China and India are killing us, Bernie! Right? What are you doing about this assault on humanity? I haven’t heard you say a thing about China and India.

Btw, I just saw Marc Morano on Fox News this morning and he was commenting on Bernie Sander’s climate change statements.

Fox News needs to get their contributor, Mark Steyn, involved in this climate change debate. He and Marc Morano are very good at putting the CAGW lies in perspective.

Which presumes air travel is an environmental degradation source, and of course it isn’t

it presumes no such thing. Whether the hypocrite is correct or not about the thing for which they are being hypocritical is immaterial to their hypocrisy. You say X is bad and you participate in X, you are a hypocrite. period. Presumptions about whether or not X is as bad as claimed don’t enter into it at all.

Now that wind and solar are (supposedly) cheaper than fossil fuels, I imagine the operators will be falling over themselves to pay back the public bribes (‘subsidies’) that we all gave them to ‘kickstart’ the technologies? And give us all a handsome return for blighting our landscapes?

Yea, government monopolization works so well everywhere it’s implemented. It’s not like our civilisation is over 2,000 years old and we’ve never tried these things before. What? You talking, like, history or something?

Which is what was said the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that, and so on back to the very first time it failed. The Next time will be no different than all the times before because, the only *right way* is to not do it at all.

Australias power was govt owned
and prices were low and we didnt have blackouts
then we got sold out n sold off
our powers the highest in the world or damned close to it 39c a kwh
and blackouts are a real possibility every really hot day
or really cold one for that
smart meters in Vic drove supply charges up from 40 a quarter to 135$ presently.
mandated and forced on us BY a private consortium and with Labor govt support

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reminds me of the way Barack Obama suddently appeared on the national stage to become President a few years later. She will be running for President sooner than later, as she checks all the boxes the Democrats love: female, minority, leftist.

Maybe. But she says so many silly things. Obama was excused the silly things he said (“57 states”, “Marine Corpse”, “Austrian Language”) because he was tired. Occasional-Cortex doesn’t have that excuse. She’ll have to rely on “public education” as her excuse, and that won’t get her far with the teacher’s union.

Let’s see how she fares in the next primary, June 2020. In AOC’s district, there were 214,750 active registered Democratic voters. Cortez got 15,897 votes and incumbent Crowley got 11,761. This was a low-interest primary and she “came in under the radar”. Another case of “…nah, no need to make appearances in Michigan and Wisconsin… oops”

In 2020, Crowley will probably pull out all the stops to get his seat back. It will be a very interesting race to follow.

Losing an election apparently isn’t a disqualifier from being a presidential hopeful in the DNC. Look at Beto, he lost his attempt in Texas against Cruz and is being touted as the second coming of Obama and potential 2020 Democrat presidential nominee.

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Eh? looks like a cut and paste error put a bunch of garbage at the beginning of my post. Should start with “US Constitution, Article II, Section 1”. Sorry about that. Mods, could you clean that up? I really miss the edit button.

And, by the way, she’s 29 and already elected to congress so your 35 for Congress is obviously wrong without even looking up it up. But FYI it’s 25 years old to run for a seat in the House of Representatives and 30 years old to run for a seat in the Senate.

Damn, I could have sworn that what they taught us in school was 35 for the House, 40 for the Senate, and 45 for the President. I remember thinking how very OLD you had to be to be in government was surprising.

I think it should probably be more like 25. Give them a few years experience in the real world, away from the indoctrination centers of higher education, before letting them anywhere near a voting booth (or mail-in ballot)

She is getting outsized attention and one has to ask why. Thank the media for turning a blithering idiot into a Daily Quote. Direct a microphone in her direction and she turns into a Chatty Cathy Doll with a pull cord stuck on stupid.

Occasio-Cortez is the product of our urban Public School system. The average millennial thinks she is brilliant despite the fact they can’t find Mexico on a map of North America. A thinking person has to be wondering about the Trillions we have invested in Public School Education and whether we should even expect a Return on our Investment.

Check out Dr. Duke Pesta, Charlotte Iserbyt, Brett Veinotte, John Taylor Gatto, Richard Grove… So much dense, useful information that covers the history and methodologies for how we arrived at this point. BTW, that is real journalism and philosophy. In one hour of their production they have more truth than a year of MSM. thanks

Understand, Honest liberty, that a socialist calls redistribution “government investments.” I am using their language sarcastically but if you prefer to be literal then certainly you are correct. Just realize that it is not just your property tax that goes to the Public Schools. Federal tax dollars are redistributed to the states for the public school indoctrination of which Common Core is a small part.
Here is a fun fact. When Obama passed his Trillion dollar stimulus package for all that economic “stimulating” of the shovel ready jobs that he subsequently guessed, weren’t so shovel ready after all, “Yuck Yuck,” he was sending 20 BIllion of that package to shore up the Maryland State Teachers Pension fund.
Not sure how many state teachers pensions were shored up with after being devastated by Dodd/Frank’s “give everybody a house” legislation that brought on the Great Depression that necessitated the Obama “stimulus” package but it happened on the heals of the Trillion dollar TARP bill the year before where they borrowed on the backs of the middle class to bail out the Financial sector that they broke with the very same Dodd/Frank bill.
Subsequently Harry Reid didn’t pass a budget until, I believe, year six of Obama’s Presidency, meaning they had doubled discretionary spending from 500+ Billion to 1 trillion which is why the Federal debt doubled under the 8 years of Obama from 10 to 20 trillion and then Obama had the audacity with the help of a complicit media, to brag in his second term that he reduced spending by 250 billion when he had actually increased it by that much. The misdirection of the magic trick performed right before our eyes with the help of the main stream magicians assistants and a “dumbed down” public school educated populous.

I’m against all forms of theft (amazing how my Android phone will not permit me to enter that through swipe keyboard-1984 in action).

Most of the issues of tyrannical, centralized power would be avoided if no property, income, or usage tax was mandatory. Tariffs suck but that was the original finding for government.

Then, imagine this:
all those hand-waving virtue-signallers would be forced to personally fund the supposed things about which they care so deeply.

In that society individuals would be strengthened, creating more freedom to create and liberty to pursue matters of personal interest, rather than falling for the corporate University scheme to earn a paper to become trainable and make Mega-corporations
Significantly higher returns on product compared to ones yearly salary; men would be men (and be able to provide for the family with one income so the women could school the children), black father’s would be at home (hence violence reduced and welfare wouldn’t keep giving them just enough to vote Democrat because of low information voting and ignorant selfishness), illegals wouldn’t be invading with force because free healthcare and education wouldn’t be provided (oh, and they’d be forced to learn English), wars would be almost non-existent (because it wouldn’t have guaranteed stolen money available to pay for it)..
Communities would be able to police themselves because they wouldn’t be forced to leave into multi-cultural self mutilation and the police would know their neighbors, so they’d be less likely to assault their own personal community… And on and on.

Remove foundational theft in society and you get more freedom, less restriction, superior decentralized education (hence, socialism works stand a chance since logic and personal responsibility is taught in these settings), and healthier small communities. The Cortez types of the world would be run out of town, or shamed into alignment with freedom loving individuals. They can’t grasp that hierarchies have existed for billions of years which is why they hate Jordan Peterson; they don’t have the mental capacity to string together multiple complex ideas. Remove taxation and you remove the likelihood people like this knucklehead ever get into office

Part of the problem of course is that the politicians have changed the meaning of simple words in order to “sell” their schemes.
When the public got tired of “spending” the pols simply said “We are not spending, we are “investing” (as though that changed the impact on the national debt.) No returns from that “ investment” were ever quantified.

Cortez is and will be tolerated by party and MSM alike because she is clearly a ditz and gets a lot of publicity for the far left; she will be treated as a “lovable clown” and her gaffs will be ignored. (See Biden, Joe)

“She is getting outsized attention and one has to ask why. Thank the media for turning a blithering idiot into a Daily Quote. Direct a microphone in her direction and she turns into a Chatty Cathy Doll with a pull cord stuck on stupid.”

That gave me a good laugh, Bill! 🙂

The answer to her outsized attention is, as you point out, the media.

She does seem to be stuck on stupid to us, but her side of the political spectrum probably thinks she is brilliant. She,herself, certainly gives me the impression that she thinks she already has all the answers. But as we can see from what she has said, she is sadly confused about a lot of things, and doesn’t have a clue that she is.

Tom, I worked with a young College Student from U of M/College Park who suggested that I couldn’t know anything about Marxism because he only just learned about it in class last semester. Apparently Maryland failed to inform the students that Marx published Das Kapital in 1867.

Of course they think Chatty Cathy is brilliant. Apparently they are taught nowadays that Marx was a genius who’s ideas have not been correctly implemented in society but that eventually some GovMint led by the likes of Chatty, will get it right and from each according to his means to each according to their needs will eventually lead us down a golden Utopian path where we will all reside in a new Shining City on a Hill called Obamaville where the Wizards of ODD will rule us all.

Of course they think Chatty Cathy is brilliant. Apparently they are taught nowadays that Marx was a genius who’s ideas have not been correctly implemented in society but that eventually some GovMint led by the likes of Chatty, will get it right and from each according to his means to each according to their needs will eventually lead us down a golden Utopian path where we will all reside in a new Shining City on a Hill called Obamaville where the Wizards of ODD will rule us all.

unfortunately the reality is that Obamaville looks an awful lot like Hooverville (a shanty town built during the Great Depression by the homeless, jobless, and dispossessed)

John, you and I know that but unfortunately my young friend with a shiny new degree in Urban Studies, from the University of Maryland, not only doesn’t believe me, he thinks I am a racist, homophobic misogynist with xenophobia oozing from my pores. Whatever that has to do with a disdain for Marx i will never know but to him, I am just a BigOT.

Institutions of higher yearning wash the best brains. I think he believes 1984 is a graphic novel depicting life under Reagan, rather than a cautionary tale about what comes after Hooverville when we turn to Big Brother to provide.

LOL, love it. I’m gonna borrow that and combine it with the priceless “Ocasional-Cortex” tag above to make it a comprehensive overall summation – “Ocasional-Cortex, a Chatty Cathy Doll with a pull cord stuck on stupid.”

Difficult to choose between being anti big corporations and rich folks and being “green”. But even a blind hog stumbles on acorns now and then. Perhaps if you say enough stupid things once in a while something logical comes out of your pie hole.

I had an electronic wrist watch once that one day decided that there were 99 minutes in an hour.
Having designed clock circuitry, I know exactly which part broke.
I have no idea what happened to it, would have made an interesting curio.

Commies aren’t wrong about everything. If they say that the sun rises in the east, do we disagree with them because of their ideology?

The other thing that comes to mind is that even a blind squirrel finds the occasional nut.

Having said the above, I don’t entirely agree with Ocasio-Cortez on the general principle. The government should not spend money with the expectation of an immediate financial return. That activity should be left to the private sector. The government should spend money on curiosity-driven scientific research.

Subsidizing renewable energy and electric cars will be seen as a huge waste of money. The subsidies are based on the observation that computer technology has gotten cheaper and more powerful as it became more available and more used. Government money spent on the space program is seen to have accelerated the development of integrated circuits and thus the computer industry. That isn’t the normal case. If it were, the family car would get 1000 mpg and weigh 5 pounds and cost $50.

Most things are governed by the law of diminishing returns. Without a scientific breakthrough most things improve incrementally and those improvements slow down with time.

The opposite of the computer case is that of drug research. It’s described by Eroom’s Law.

The cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years (inflation-adjusted).[1] In order to highlight the contrast with the exponential advancements of other forms of technology (such as transistors) over time, the law was deliberately spelled as Moore’s law spelled backwards.

In other words, throwing subsidies at renewable energy and electric cars is almost guaranteed not to work. The transistor was developed well before the space program began. Integrated circuits came along at about the same time as it began. In other words, the necessary breakthroughs had already happened. Government money did not lead to those breakthroughs. Contrast that with renewable energy and electric cars where energy storage breakthroughs are desperately needed. It’s as likely as not that government money will, because of how it’s allocated, actually prevent the necessary breakthroughs.

Some of her comments are encouraging.
I think most sensible progressives would prefer to reduce fossil fuel consumption
by providing workable or improved public transportation like subways and light
rail rather than by subsidizing expensive toys for rich people, if they thought about it.
Maybe she will help shift the discussion.

I think most sensible progressives would prefer to reduce fossil fuel consumption
by providing workable or improved public transportation like subways and light
rail rather than by subsidizing expensive toys for rich people

Which is workable in the big cities that progressive populate. Not so much in the wider-spread out rural areas that the progressives don’t populate. There’s a reason big cities have subways and rural areas generally don’t – it makes more sense for transporting a large amount all going to the same places a short distance away (ie most subway stops in a city) than it does when you have a geographically dispersed population all going to different, far apart places (ie vast stretches not as densely populated rural “fly-over” country)

She is not upset that Musk and others were given tons of government money. She is upset that there has been no return for the government. Conservatives would argue that they should not have been given the money. She is not making that case at all. She is all for the government spending. She just wants the government to also control the decision making, with the illusion that this will insure a return for the people, despite 100 years of history to the contrary.

There is nothing encouraging about her comment. She is for bigger spending and bigger government control. Imagine someone as intelligent as Elon Musk (or yourself) being controlled by someone as stupid as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez! That is what she is advocating. That is what she is working towards.

That’s hardly a mystery. The main-stream media gives here so much attention because she is one of them; a young, attractive, non-white, well-spoken, emotive socialist with very little knowledge and even less wisdom, but complete confidence in her superiority!

Thomas Sowell writes about the ‘Anointed’. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Anointed 2.0! She is your ‘Hillary Clinton’ upgrade, with a new sleek look, and without that annoying whiny voice. At the core, the Anointed 2.0 version comes with a much more powerful marxist social engine and is virtually free of clunky historical context that would occasionally slow down the earlier models.

I hope you like the new models, because they have been mass-produced by the public school system, and will be flooding the market for many years to come!

Personally I think her main problem with Musk is far simpler. After years in the red and subsisting on government grants and subsidies, Tesla is starting to look like they might actually get to the point they might be profitable.

And if Tesla starts being profitable instead of subsisting on the government trough, that would make Musk a CAPITALIST.

Ocasio-Cortez is a veritable human meme generator. The number of memes of her already created before she’s even started serving is astonishing. She’s the gift that keeps on giving. I think she missed the announcement when GOD told all of the pre-borns to line up to get their brains. Here’s some examples:

I thought that putting more electric cars on the road and more solar panels on roofs was the return that the greenies were looking for when then subsidized these industries. Musk has been more successful at doing this than any other individual, so what’s the problem? Were they lying when they said all they were trying to do was to save the planet?

We can’t tell whether Ms. Occasio-Cortez isn’t getting enough greenmail from her corporate friends, or whether she is to ensure that no regulation will harm them, because the song of the “Progressive” never changes.

She is wise enough to know that if you promise free stuff, you can’t deliver on, in a poor district, you can get more votes than someone who doesn’t do that.
She is not wise enough to know that she should have spent time understanding the difference between the economic and political systems of the United States, and the economic and political systems of Venezuela. She is laboring under the false impression that if 51% of the people in this country want to commit economic suicide, then the other 49% have no say in the matter.

I think you overestimate her intelligence. I think she actually believes she can deliver on the free stuff she’s promised even though she has no clue about how she’ll pay for it (or even about basic economics).

OC is quoted frequently only because she says so much really stupid stuff. ~unemployment is low because everyone is working 2 jobs~ She lacks the ability to use basic logic. Hence, she is unable to understand the broken window fallacy. I am often surprised by how common even smart looking, successful people get through life without this ability. Dingbat Pelosi and her cash-for-clunkers program is a good example. That was a huge waste of federal funds. And yet she will be returning to her former house leadership position that comes with the personal jet. OC’s future looks bright.

Why not start with that one. Perhaps the good folks of the USA could put on yellow jackets and protest, demand accountability and change etc, just like the French. Perhaps you could lead them Ms Cortex.
With regards

Basically, the Pentagon doesn’t have a secret stash of $21 trillions dollars, they have (deliberately) poor/sloppy accounting practices that results in “errors” (both positive and negative) that if added together amount to $21 trillion in unaccounted transactions.

from the Nation article:

And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out. But the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is so obtuse, Skidmore and Fitts added, that it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion

The total budget for the DoD during the period of the audit was $9.2 trillion dollars.
Are you under the impression they are responsible to account for more than double the amount that they were budgeted?
That seems a high standard. Are we holding the “War on Poverty” programs to the same standard?

There’s not a secret pile of $21 trillion dollars lying around in the pentagon basement. It’s shonky bookkeeping that resulted in $21 trillion in transactions (both positive and negative) that can’t be traced to their sources because the money has been moved from one account to another over and over again. The positives and negatives mostly cancel each other out. Basically the same money that the US government budgeted them, which is a lot less the $21 trillion, is counted multiple times as money appropriated for one thing is moved around to pay for other things.

Look at it this way, Project A is budgeted 1 billion dollars. the budget was based on an overestimate, and say 100 million of that wasn’t needed for Project A, so it is then moved to another fund, say Project B. 100 million is then taken from A and added to B. That’s 200 million in transactions (-100 million for A and +100 million for B) multiply that across the entire DoD over the course of decades and you get to $21 trillion in transactions

The Pentagon may still have a few billion in unaccounted money floating about in various accounts, but not trillions.

“The Pentagon may still have a few billion in unaccounted money floating about in various accounts, but not trillions.”

That’s much closer to the truth.

Btw, I heard Occasio-Cortez cluelessly say the other day that the military had received a $700 bilion budget increase.

The $700 billion is actually the military’s total budget. The actual budget increase is a little over $100 billion.

Which was desperately needed, I might add, after eight years of Obama/socialist neglect of the military. When socialists get into power they always start by wanting to cut the military budget. It looks like Occasio-Cortez is no different. Which makes her cluelessness a danger to U.S. national security.

careful what you wish for. The Democrats initially thought Trump was a clown and wanted him to run for President. It was inconceivable to them that he might actually win. See how well that worked out for them.

Fortunately she isn’t eligible to run until 2024. so they are safe from the prospects of her being their nominee and we are safe from the prospects (no matter how remote they might seem) of her actually winning.

When a person gets scammed there is a period of time when they begin to sense that something is wrong before they realize they’ve been had.
“We The People” have been scammed. (Solyndra, Tesla, Solar Power, Wind Power etc.)
I’m probably wrong, but I do hope this young socialist is entering the “begin to sense that something is wrong” stage and wakes up.

bankrupt Abengoa (leading promoter of solar projects): $2.6 billion in federal loans and loan guarantees as well as $986 million in federal grants and tax credits plus another $7.8 million in state and local subsidies

Then there’s Solyndra and a host of other failed government backed “green” energy companies/projects during Obama’s watch.

Says a woman who has never created a product or service and has no clue about how wealth is created but fully understands how to steal wealth that belongs to others and give it to away to those who don’t deserve it. This monster is drunk on power. She’ll be 100 times worse than Pelosi if she somehow retains office, but the way the Demoncats get away with stealing elections I think she will wreaking havoc for many years to come side by side with her demon sister Kamala. God help us.

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